It gets late early out there. Yogi Berra said that 25 years ago about the afternoon shadows that darken Yankee Stadium's left field. Like all legitimate Solomons, Yogi's epiphanies still resonate with several layers of meaning. This spring, for instance, it's getting late early out there in the American League East, where only a month into the season the Detroit Tigers are so thoroughly rolling over their competition that local citizens already speak of magic numbers, and visiting sportswriters ask only half in jest about playoff credentials.
Elsewhere, while gleeful legions of reborn fans squeeze into antique Tiger Stadium, the faithful stew. In Boston, where despair usually doesn't appear until August, bleacher bums watch their Red Sox through peepholed paper bags. In New York, last-place fans glumly file into the House That Ruth Built like atheists going to church. In Baltimore, where the world champions lost 10 of their first 12, Oriole loyalists beg their team to get serious. Meanwhile, back in his Detroit dugout, Tiger manager Sparky Anderson just shakes his head and spits. "Never," says the man they call Commander Whitehead, "did I dream we'd be this good."
By last week "this good" translated into a 21-4 record. But this is no miracle team like the 1969 Mets. Last year the Tigers ran up 92 wins, third best in the majors. Pitchers Jack Morris and Dan Petry combined to win 39 games; catcher Lance Parrish, shortstop Alan Trammell and second baseman Lou Whitaker each won Gold Gloves and hit soundly, and center fielder Chet Lemon banged 24 home runs and fielded spectacularly. It was a good season, but six games not good enough in the toughest division in baseball. So over the winter the team signed standout reliever Willie Hernandez and slugger Darrell Evans, Detroit's first blue-chip free agent. Winter turned to spring, and the Tigers were half a dozen games ahead of the pack.
"We're not going crazy in the clubhouse over our record," says Morris, who began the year with five wins and one no-hitter. "We know we're going to go through some bad times this season, but the 18 games we won in April are 18 games we won't have to win later." Petry has also come through, starting the year at 4-1 with a 2.06 earned run average. Third starter Milt Wilcox won his first three decisions, while the rest of the staff have each won at least once.
Then there is the Tigers' offense. After Motown Records moved out of town, Detroit relinquished its claim to the title "Hitsville, U.S.A." No longer. Leading the majors through last week in team batting, the Tigers now seem to have found the perfect blend of power and spray. Trammell hit in 18 straight games and still hovers near .400, while Lemon (.323, 6 home runs), Whitaker (.333), Evans (.278, 16 RBI) and outfielder Kirk Gibson (.309, 4 HR's) have remained on stroke. Most surprising has been the .435 hitting of Barbaro Garbey, a versatile rookie who wandered into Organized Baseball from the 1980 Cuban freedom flotilla. With so many nimble sticks around, no one seems to feel unduly pressured. "I'm very comfortable playing in Detroit," says Evans, "because I don't feel I have to carry the whole team. Here, there are nine guys in the lineup who can win the game for us any day of the week."
That is if Sparky lets those nine guys play. With his incessant shuttling of stars and scrubeenies in and out of games, he is a testament to Ty Cobb's dictum that "a fellow bossing a big-league ball club is busier than a one-armed paperhanger with the flying hives." In one game against the Red Sox last week, he started Rusty Kuntz, Rod Allen and Marty Castillo over Evans, Whitafter and Gibson. The Tigers won 11-2. "As long as we're winning," says the skipper, "I'm going to keep everyone playing. They're all part of this team."
Devotion: This year all of Detroit feels a part of this team. The Tigers have been averaging close to 25,000 fans a game during a wet and drafty spring, and team officials seem confident the club will draw 2 million for the first time since their 1968 world-championship season. But raw attendance means nothing in determining whether the Tigers will be, as Sparky claims, the most successful team of the 1980s. What clubs of destiny need is a self-appointed symbol of partisan devotion, which the Tigers have in the form of 88-year-old Sister Mary Baseball, a.k.a. Sister Mary Sobkowiak of Detroit's Our Lady Help of Christians Convent.
"I'm their guardian angel," says the nun, who recites rosaries between innings and counts one novena for every nine Tiger triumphs. "I pray for them to win," she says, "because it makes the people ofDetroit so happy. When they're winning, no one throws bottles or curses." Still, like all good fans, she reserves the right to carp. "Oooh, I'm mad at Anderson," Sister Mary Baseball grumbled last week after a rare Detroit loss. "How could he intentionally walk that guy in the sixth?"